St. Jerome in his Study by Albrecht Durer, 1514

The HTML format allows the reader to "free-associate" among the five standards. The reader may read all of the writings that apply to a given standard, or she may read each piece with a eye toward all applicable standards, or she may read all of the writings in the order in which they?re presented. This format allows the reader to weave her own connections among the writings and among the standards, to interact with ?rather than react to? the ideas presented here. My hope is that this format communicates a view of teaching that embraces all of these standards with a holistic (rather than divisive) perspective. In addition, this format allows this portfolio to be a work in progress, a work that I can revise and adapt as my views on being a professional educator evolve and change. This is appropriate because the world and my place in and with it will always be in flux.

(nudge, nudge, wink, wink!)

Under Owens? plan, schools will be "graded" based on their students? performance on the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) tests. The top-performing schools (those that receive As and Bs) will receive extra money for continued development. The bottom 2% of schools will become charter schools to be managed by private corporations if they do not improve within a three-year probationary period.

There are a number of fallacies that undergird Owens? proposal and are dangerous to education and to our students. First, there is the assumption that the CSAP is an unbiased (in terms of cultural, gender, and economic issues that have been proven to affect students? performance on tests of this sort) and equitable measure of the education a student receives. Whether this is, in fact, the case is very much in question. The CSAP is a rather young test in this realm, and its statistical and educational validity have yet to be proven. In addition, there can be no question that students who come from backgrounds other than the mainstream that the CSAP targets, such as limited-English proficient students, students from highly mobile families, and students on free- and reduced-lunch programs, will face additional challenges that reflect a need for greater educational attention, not for blame and chastisement.

Second is the assumption that poor test scores are an indication of poor education, which, in turn, is an indication of poor school management and/or poor teaching. Again, this is an oversimplified view of the complex process of education. Poor test scores are as often the result of poor tests that are statistically and/or educationally invalid. Because standardized tests such as these allow very little room for multiple ways of knowing and expressing one?s knowledge, they inevitably present a picture of their subjects that is extremely narrow and unjust.

Third, there is the fallacy that all members of our society agree on definitions of words such as "excellence," "improvement," and "success," terms upon which Owens? proposal leans very heavily. For many children and families in our communities, these concepts are not measured by academic grades, standardized test scores, or real estate resale values. A society striving to overcome its deeply-seated repressive assumptions and to provide a fundamentally just education and life experience for all of its members measures it improvement and success on a scale of compassion, not competition.

Finally, there is the assumption that our school system and its infrastructure are "good enough" as is, and that all that is needed to maximize their potential is competent, "professional" management. This assumption undermines the professionalism of all truly professional educators who strive each day to provide an educational experience of high quality and equity for their students. It suggests that teachers and principals don?t know their own business, and that businessmen (and they are mostly men) and legislators could do a better job of educating our children if given the chance. It implies that teaching is a non-specialized skill of relatively low value and recalls the antiquated industrial notion that "anyone can teach." This fallacy severely devalues the unique skills, resources, and vision that professional educators bring to the world of teaching every day.

There are many other fallacies and false assumptions upon which Governor Owens? proposal relies. These fallacies are short-sighted and narrow-minded at best, and racist and classist at worst. They shift ability into the hands of those who would use public education for their own gain, and culpability into the hands of those who will suffer for that gain. The inevitable outcome of such a proposal will result in a greater and greater division between those who have and those who do not, a greater and greater trend toward a two-class society. In this society, those who have achieved hegemony will be able to rest easy, luxuriate in their ignorance, and exploit those who have been brought into subordination. The have-nots in this social order will be stripped of all economic and social power. In order to simply survive in the world created for and by the dominant forces, they will be forced to work for the offered wage, regardless of its injustice. This is the future toward which Governor Owens? bill beckons us. Will we heed his call, or will we march resolutely in the other direction, defiant, and determined to find a better way for ourselves, for our children, and for our society?

The Master?s Plus program has been a frustrating, confusing, exhilarating, and truly transformative experience for me. When I tell people that, after two years in a graduate education program, I have decided not to teach, they say, "Oh, that?s too bad," or "I?m sorry it didn?t work out." In response, I have to tell them that it?s a really good thing. Had I not gone through the Master?s Plus program, I would not have come to this decision with such confidence. I probably would not have had the opportunity to subject my assumptions about who I am and what my life is to such intense scrutiny if I had gone through a traditional teacher licensure program. I probably would have flown headlong into teaching and found myself miserable when I arrived. I have made a conscious decision that allows me to feel good about who I am and what my life is, and I am grateful to the Master?s Plus experience for leading me to that decision.

Of course, there are many people who say that the fact that I have decided not to teach reflects poorly on the Master?s Plus program. This is an important point that deserves attention. Did the program paint an unrealistic picture of teaching for me? Did the program fail to prepare me adequately for the challenges of teaching? Did the program?s emphasis on reflection, on social justice, and on the ethics of teaching lead me inadvertently to my decision?

The answer to all of these questions is, most assuredly, yes. In my second semester of the program, I became aware that the goal of the Master?s Plus program is not to prepare or create teachers. That is the realm of BA and post-BA licensure programs. The Master?s Plus program seeks to prepare and create members of the community of professional educators, sensitive to the politics, philosophies, and theories of that milieu. It is not concerned with the nuts-and-bolts practice of teaching, nor with the quotidian experiences and dilemmas of the average teacher. It is concerned with the large, overarching, and influential political, philosophical, social, theoretical, psychological, cultural, and economic aspects of education as a realm of personal and social activity for both students and teachers.

For many people in our Master?s Plus cohort, this program was not a good fit. While they were more than happy to engage in enthusiastic discourse regarding the issues the program wished to emphasize, they also wanted to know how to set up a gradebook. They wanted to know where to find sources for lesson plans and other classroom materials. They wanted to know, practically and tangibly, how to be effective teachers. Principally, they wanted to get knee- and elbow-deep in the classroom and get dirty. For these people, the Master?s Plus experience was often frustrating, existing as it did in less tangible domains of experience.

However, for me, these intangible and highly hypothetical elements were the things that made the Master?s Plus experience so exciting and so effective. The Master?s Plus program forced me to think in challenging and sometimes unsettling ways about what teaching is for and what my place is in the world of professional education. It compelled me to clarify and refine the fundamental beliefs that lay beneath my decision to enter the program and the field of education. As I near the end of the program, I feel I have developed a clear and confident relationship with these beliefs. I have developed a level of comfort with their mutability. And I have developed a rather clear vision of what teaching is and should be. In harmony with this vision and with my beliefs, I have decided not to become a teacher.

My vision of what teaching is and should be will be fleshed out in the writings collected in this portfolio, but I will briefly summarize here. I believe that education (including experiences inside and outside the school environment) should scaffold every child?s rise through Maslow?s hierarchy of needs, from basic survival needs, where necessary, through self-actualization. The sum of all educational experiences should provide all children with the tools, skills, and knowledge they need to live truly happy, conscious, responsible, ethical, fulfilling, and loving lives. It should enable them to succeed within the social and cultural system in which they find themselves, or to subvert and change that system where they perceive it to be unjust. It should give them confidence and security in their own personal and social agency, in their abilities to affect positively their own lives and the lives of others. It should encourage all children to become self-aware, creative, reflective, and self-actualized people.

What is the teacher?s role in all of this? Ideally, the teacher should be on a similar path toward self-awareness and self-actualization. A teacher who has achieved a sense of security and confidence in his own life will be better equipped to scaffold his students? experiences along their developmental paths. He will be able to provide time, energy, resources, experiences, and food for thought that will help his students climb Maslow?s great pyramid, without concern for his own advancement or ego. Though not a selfless person (for a selfless person is far from self-actualized), the teacher will be able to focus primarily on his students? selves because he has achieved?through life experiences, reflection, relationships, and other educative encounters?a well-developed, articulate, and loving sense of self and of his place in his world. Essentially, the most effective teacher will come very close to representing the desired outcome of this vision of education and its purpose.

In addition, I have come to the realization that, unfortunately, many of the attitudes and structures that inform the experience of formal public education make my vision of education impossible. Mandated public education for all children between the ages of six and sixteen, with its seven-hours-a-day, 180-days-a-year for 10 years schedule, its hierarchical administrative structure, its age-based grade levels, its competitive grading scale, and its emphasis on individual achievement over communal achievement, creates an atmosphere that is inimical to the democratic and compassionate education that I believe our children need. A teacher who wishes to make a dent in this institution needs even greater emotional, physical, and psychological resources if he wishes to guide his students? adventures in self-making.

Finally?let?s be honest here, of all places?there is the simple and complicated matter of personal economics. This relates, of course, to my aforementioned neediness. I cannot afford, in a very literal, financial way, to be a teacher. As a young person, recently married, attempting to buy a home and to feel liberated from the oppressive economic structures in which I find myself, hoping to raise children and to live a full and healthy life, the remuneration teaching offers in exchange for the unparalleled personal investment is inadequate. I am currently employed as a computer programmer, a job I really enjoy for its intellectual challenges and steep learning curve. I have no formal technical background or experience. I work approximately thirty hours per week and am paid the same as a teacher with a Master?s degree who has been teaching in the district where I student taught for fifteen years. Certainly, there are very different rewards offered by teaching, and, just as certainly, I never had any delusions that teaching would pay well, but my situation begs a fundamental economic question: why can?t all forms of socially valued work be remunerated in a manner commensurate with that social value? After all, there are many other talented, intelligent, caring, and concerned people in our country who have been forced into the same decision I have made because they can?t afford to teach.

So where does this leave us? Well, clearly, it leaves me alienated from the world of professional education for now. And it leaves us all still thinking about what teaching is and what it?s for. Could the Master?s Plus program as a collective effort have changed my mind, done something differently so that the outcome was that I decided to become a teacher? I don?t think so. There are some very talented and caring people who are finishing this program and going on to truly make a difference in the lives of thousands of children. For me, the two-year period in which my Master?s Plus experience occurred comprised a conspiracy (or coincidence, if you prefer) of circumstances that led almost inexorably to my decision. More details about those circumstances will be revealed in the writings to follow.

I am grateful to many people for their love, support, guidance, advocacy, attention, and stamina: my CU professors and advisors (Matthew Goldwasser, Jenifer Helms, Ernie House, Eric Johnston, Shuaib Meacham, Bill McGinley, Stevi Quate, and Laura Thomas); my wife, Michelle; my cohortmates and friends (Jim, Kari, Ramona, Andy, Jonathan, Michelle, Marnie, Lisa, Nicole, Catherine, Shelley, Bryan, Tim, Luke, Stephanie, Becky, Steve, Bob, and Phil); my friends (Brian Boucher, Royden Mills, Anthony Zolnik); my sister-in-law, Becki Lee, and my mother-in-law, Diana Lee; my parents, Lorraine and Bill Eyl; my cooperating teacher for student teaching, Carrie Mitchell; the dean of the high school in which I student taught, Sherri Schumann; my cooperating teachers for practicum assignments (Mary Prassa, Don Goodfriend, Michael Palmieri, John Martin, and Brian Kane); my coworkers at GE Access; and my many classmates and interlocutors. Thanks are due to all for their participation in and support of this experience. All of you have played an important role in the development of the professional educator (and person) represented by this portfolio. Thank you.

Also tied to the poetry unit was a more formal writing assignment. Another of my objectives in the poetry unit was to help students see that "reading" is an important activity in which they engage every day. Throughout the unit, we discussed popular music lyrics as much as anthologized poetry. I assigned a compare/contrast essay (a genre I don?t believe in, but one that is required by the school?s curriculum) in which students were to compare and contrast a poem from their literature anthology with a song lyric. In all honesty, aside from meeting a curricular requirement, I had hoped to assess my students? ability to "read" non-literary works and literary works. This was a miserable failure. I sincerely believe that they are able to do this, to see similarities among seemingly disparate entities in their worlds, but the assignment was ill-defined and not explained very well. The essays were all horrible and unsuccessful. Students discussed the works on the most superficial level (length, content, author, and medium). Initially, this assignment was to have a great deal of grade weight, but I decided to check-grade it instead since I felt that my students? poor performance was caused by the assignment itself.

After poetry, my English 10A class read Antigone by Sophocles. This is, again, a curricular obligation. My goal in teaching this work was actually right in line with the state standards. I wanted my students to see that this play, like many works of literature, conveys universal and timeless themes related to the human experience, that the questions it raises are as relevant today as they were in Sophocles?s time. To this end, I assigned students in groups to write contemporary American English translations of each scene of the play. After we finished reading the play, students read these translations to the class, who then assessed whether the translations conveyed the same meaning as the play, how the meaning was changed by the translation, etc. I provided students with a worksheet to help them critique one another?s translations. This assessment activity was fairly successful because it placed students in an interactive relationship with the text and required them to develop highly sophisticated and personalized readings of the text.

Understanding as much as we now do about Tanya?s and Jamar?s attitudes and motivations regarding literacy and the practices of reading and writing, we can draw some general conclusions about how to approach reading and writing with students in our classrooms. While there may be a handful of students in the classroom who are drawn to literate activities, there will be as many who have never read a book or written more than five sentences in one sitting. The majority of students, of course, will fall somewhere in between, with adequate literacy skills, but with no passion for, or even interest in, reading and writing. Our challenge as language arts teachers is to enrich the skills and experience of all of these students, but the even greater challenge is to engage them all. It is this challenge with which I believe Tanya and Jamar might be able to help us.

Our first priority is to provide reading and writing opportunities in which each student can find empathy and identification. If literate activities inspire these feelings in students, the question of why they should even care will be addressed. This means maintaining a truly multicultural perspective, not simply based on race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, but based on each individual student?s background and experience. If we are aware of what each student brings to the classroom, we can choose intelligently what we bring to the classroom to engage each student.

Introducing students to reading and writing activities that inspire them and cause them to reflect on the varieties of human experience and human potential will make the activities of reading and writing more relevant to their lives and therefore more interesting. Specifically, for Tanya and Jamar, biography was a very important genre. When students read about great people and write about themselves as great people in their own right, they begin to see the historical power of reading and writing. The boom of nineteenth century English students of literacy who published their own autobiographies is a testament to this. Exposure to stories about unique individuals inspires students to think of themselves as unique individuals who might have interesting stories to tell. This inspiration alone might be enough to compel a student to develop and hone his reading and writing skills.

Of course, we will not be able to reach every student. Not every student will find literacy appealing, but if we can use personalized approaches to teaching reading and writing, we stand a greater chance of hooking them. Above all, Tanya and Jamar should make us aware that each student?s reasons for reading and writing (or not) are unique and must be addressed uniquely. If we can help students understand the relevance of literacy to their own lives, we will have accomplished a great and laudable feat.

Fostering relationships with adults (that?s us, if you can believe it) through letter writing is an excellent idea, particularly with the teacher responding. This kind of personal touch can often seem impossible to achieve, but this makes it simple and attainable.

Helping the students develop their community seems a little more difficult. While I like the activities suggested in the text, I have a hard time imagining them flying in a classroom full of at-risk high school students. This is something I?d like to discuss more. Has anyone seen anything effective on this score going on in their practica/classrooms?

Whole class collaborations like determining the classroom rules seem like a great idea. Specifically, I?ve never thought that class rule making was a very authentic activity since, at least in a practical sense, students will likely never have the opportunity to do this outside of the classroom. What about having the class review the school rules? Each student could pick a rule he "likes" and a rule he thinks should be eliminated. The class could then discuss their choices as a group and debate the relative value of the school rules.

For myself, I don?t think too much can be said about the value of knowing our students? cultures, communities, experiences, family lives, etc. This has to be part of what we?re calling assessment, because we can?t propose to teach to each student without knowing this vital information. Along these lines, openly addressing issues of race, gender, and class in the classroom helps the teacher get to know students, helps students get to know each other, makes students feel that their contributions are valued, and forces students to reflect even if fleetingly, on their own biases, stereotypes, etc.

November 10, 1998

Some days, I feel like this is the most original and creative learning environment that I?ve ever seen, like this teacher is truly critical and caring. But then there are days like today, when I feel as if this classroom is nothing but a holding cell for marginally domesticated animals.

Journal entry

October 27, 1998

The kids can?t sit still at all. There is constant activity. Status quo in this classroom consists of constant disruptions, interruptions and distractions.

Journal entry

December 8, 1998

Even the most innocuous topics can lead to homophobic talk in the classroom. Students were asked to write about where they would like to go on a field trip, and all said they?d like to visit the county jail and meet "the people who drop the soap." The teacher encourages this behavior.

In the end, I wondered if it was a good idea to isolate these students in a special education classroom with only minimal mainstreaming. It seemed to me that their separateness from the rest of the school aggravated their behavior and attention disorders more than it ameliorated them. In addition, the lack of contact between these students and mainstream students seemed to broaden the gulf between them every day. In Mr. Goodfriend?s classroom, these students had no positive peer role models to show them how to act and talk in a classroom. They had no peer role models to demonstrate different ways of being a good student. Conversely, the mainstream students had no one in the classroom to challenge their stereotypes about learning disabilities. The mainstream was solidified against intrusion by Mr. Goodfriend?s students and vice versa. Neither could influence or assist the other. It seems to me that the constant and persistent separation of students like those in Mr. Goodfriend?s chaotic classroom from mainstream students results in a handicapping of both populations.

What is most important to these kids, it seems, is fronting, acting out their personae for each other. What can you do with that in the classroom? It seems like process drama, musical projects, controlled graffiti projects, that kind of thing might tap and direct this need to perform.

What?s so surprising about this school is that the environment is pretty much the same old stale high school classroom, with nondescript carpet and nondescript walls, some cheap maps and RIF posters, and glaring fluorescent lights. Furthermore, it?s in a strip mall. It needs couches, and incandescent floor lamps, and things to make it feel like an alternative high school.

The school has only a few rules. Good idea. The trouble is that if you?re going to have only a handful of very broad rules, you?d better enforce them if you want them to work. It doesn?t look like anyone is.

I sat in on a writing class taught by a volunteer who is finishing her undergraduate work. She did a terrible job. She had photocopied some stuff from a terrifically dry grammar book and had the kids read it out loud and do some exercises out loud to cover parts of speech. Not only were the kids not getting it, they weren?t seeing any relevance to their lives (there wasn?t any) and they were learning to hate "language." One student was singing a stupid pop song while another was yelling obscenities at a student in another part of the building. I tried my best by offering up sentences that used the students? names and interests. Furthermore, the "teacher" didn?t really know her shit, and I had to catch her before she made the mistake of saying that "standing" was the verb in: "The two men standing over there are graduating today." After class, I suggested that she use the songs the students sing and the disruptive things they yell out as a way to discuss their natural grasp of grammar.

It will be a challenge to discuss issues of and assumptions about gender identity as these classes explore To Kill a Mockingbird. While the students seem to accept Scout with the relatively accepting term "tomboy", a discussion about justice led one of the students to assert that he thought O.J. Simpson should have been sent to prison "to become Bubba?s boyfriend." This comment made the whole class and teacher laugh, and, though it was humorous, it served to underscore and support the prevalent homophobic environment. This environment will make open and critical discussions about issues of sexuality difficult.

More importantly, the homophobia that pervades the school community, and the off-the-cuff remarks it inspires, marginalize the feelings and needs of those students who might be questioning their own sexual identities. These students will be made to feel displaced, inferior, and perhaps morally "bad" in this environment. The corresponding blow to these students? self-esteem will make it difficult for them to learn, and may even cause them to avoid class or school altogether.

Unfortunately, the teachers, such as my cooperating teacher, who are concerned about their students? attitudes toward homosexuality have little room to explore these issues. Homophobia and explicit disapproval of "sexual deviance" is so entrenched in the community that the teacher who confronts these issues in his classroom risks parental disapprobation, administrative condemnation, and even termination.

The community?s values have placed the school in the position of having to ignore or even support homophobic attitudes. Thereby, the school is forced to deny support to students whose personal or political views oppose homophobia, to deny them the same access to education, to abandon these students to fend for themselves in the "lord of the flies" atmosphere of the high school. Even in a community where racial and gender equality are accepted notions, homophobia can construct a nearly insurmountable barrier to a fundamentally just education for all children. Even when tolerance and understanding of difference are explicitly taught, the implicit lessons of prejudice taught by the community, by parents, by curricular choices, and by acceptance of intolerant attitudes may have a stronger impact on students? self-esteem and their ability to learn.

After observations in my practicum placements, a number of readings on tracking, and reflection on my own and others? experiences in tracked schools, I have come to the conclusion that, in the big picture, tracking has deleterious effects on learning and self-esteem. The alternative seems to be truly personalized and individualized instruction that addresses each individual student?s needs in an environment of heterogeneous abilities. I feel that students of all levels benefit socially and educationally from the presence of students of all levels. The lower and middle tracks benefit from the same attention that the upper track receives, while they also benefit from the model behaviors of the upper track. The students of the upper and middle track learn to understand, teach, learn from, and perhaps even like students who have previously been judged inferior. Fostering this kind of thinking is critical to social equity in society at large. Tracking fosters undemocratic and dogmatic thinking in our students. Only an untracked school environment can foster democratic, tolerant, and understanding worldviews.

Good writing is primarily about ideas, creative use of language, and an intentional structure that heightens the impact and effectiveness of the ideas and language. Why do I love Joan Didion?s writing? Ideas and language. It has nothing to do with her logical structure (which is almost transparent), her convincing details in support of her thesis, or her ability to use commas or to avoid ending sentences with prepositions.

I was speaking with an undergrad recently who was convinced that the five paragraph essay is a valuable and useful tool for teaching/learning writing. She asserted that she often falls back to the old formula even in the longer works she writes as a college student. I have no doubt that this is true. There is no law that says college professors are any less steeped in tradition than secondary teachers are. We?ve all probably had an undergraduate professor who told us we were "too young to have ideas," so we "fall back" on the formula, the fill-in-the-blank schematic that we have, in fact, mastered.

When I walked into Boulder Prep on my first day, I immediately noticed the state standards for all content areas posted prominently on one of the school?s few walls. I took this as a sign that the school had chosen to use standards as a way to help its students succeed. However, after just a couple of visits to Prep, I realized that standards were not even considered in the curriculum of the school.

The most obvious sign of the absence of standards was the proliferation of activities and their lack of connection to each teacher?s stated goals for their classes. In addition, teachers were rarely able to provide a pedagogical rationale for the activities. When I asked one teacher why he was taking his chemistry class on a field trip to the Butterfly Pavilion, he responded, "Well, it?s fun, and it gets us out of the building." This was typical of the depth of rationale behind many of the lesson plans I saw executed at Boulder Prep.

After I had been at Boulder Prep long enough to have established some rapport with the staff and administrators, I decided to ask them about their attitudes about, and approaches to, standards-based education. When I asked my cooperating teacher what he thought about standards, he told me that he felt the students weren?t being held to standards that were high enough. He believed that the only way to succeed as an educator with students with severe behavioral and attachment disorders (describing the majority of Prep?s student body) is to hold them to very high standards, and to turn them over to the streets and the justice system if they fail to meet those standards. He further explained that he believed in contract grading as an educational ultimatum, a line drawn in the sand that the teacher dares the student to cross.

After chatting with my cooperating teacher, I decided to approach the on-site administrator (I was never quite sure of his title, but he seemed to act as dean). When I asked him how his school approached standards-based education, he chuckled and said, "We don?t! We don?t have time for that shit!"

While the views of these two professional educators are unfortunate, it is important not to blame the educators for their attitudes toward and interpretation of what the standards movement is all about. The most pervasive definition?the minimum competency flavor?has been plastered everywhere by the media. Because this is also the flavor that politicians think the people want, more money has gone into promoting it than into fostering the reformative model. Also, as a result of the public policy (as opposed to the educational politics) that have driven the movement, much more funding has gone into developing the standards and their supporting documentation than has gone into educating and training educators about how and why to implement the standards in the interest of improving education (not just funding and test scores). If standards-based education is really to make a difference, much more financial and human resources will need to be invested in training. The training will have to move out of ed schools and into the field, where it is really needed. Professional educators like those I met at Boulder Prep currently have no reason to believe in standards as a tool that might be useful to them, and they would benefit from some specific, structured training on how and why standards could be used in their school. I consider myself very fortunate to have received this kind of exposure and training, to have been given the opportunity to really understand how standards can be implemented in the best interests of our students.

Why would Boulder Prep, its students and faculty, benefit from the implementation of standards-based education? First of all, standards give teachers and students a place to start. Once everyone in the classroom has negotiated what it means to demonstrate competency in the context of the benchmarks, they know that they are speaking the same language. Standards and benchmarks, therefore, provide a common language and a more reasonable solution than that suggested by my cooperating teacher.

Finally, assessment in the context of standards and benchmarks allows teachers and students to determine cooperatively and individually how competency in each of the designated areas will be demonstrated and evaluated. In the case of the Boulder Prep student body (and truly the case for most students), it is counterproductive and countermotivational to pretend that every student will achieve the same level or kind of competency, or that every student will demonstrate that competency in the same way. Standards and benchmarks allow for the kind of highly individualized assessment that students like those at Boulder Prep really need if they are to be supported and successful.

Students who are placed at-risk to the extreme degree that one can observe at Boulder Preparatory High School need clear communication, relevant education, and individualized evaluation. Coercive, behaviorist, and "hands-off" approaches all fail to meet these needs. Standards-based education implemented by well-trained and motivated educators can meet all of these needs and scaffold the ultimate academic success of these students.

To answer the questions that this assignment really asks, it will be necessary for me to admit the reality of where I stand with respect to my place in the teaching profession. It will be necessary for me to come to grips explicitly and in writing with experiences and decisions that have, until now, remained in the realms of thought and emotion. It will be necessary to explain to my advisors, teachers, friends, and family why, after two years of graduate study in education, I have decided not to become a teacher. This approach may seem to avoid rather than address the questions of the assignment, but I believe that this is my true teaching landscape, and to approach the assignment in any other way would be dishonest and disingenuous.

I should begin with my decision to apply for and enter this program. In the winter of 1997, I felt desperate to find a meaningful occupation. Earlier that year, I had quit my first long-term corporate job, realizing it asked more of me than it returned, and entered into a low-commitment temporary job at another, more generous corporation. My plan was to buy some time while I figured out where I belonged. Eight months later, I found myself still there and still no closer to finding my vocation. In a casual conversation with my parents, the idea of teaching came up. My parents, both educators, were not entirely disinterested parties. They had always felt that I would make an excellent teacher (though my mother sees me as a professor) and were very enthusiastic about the notion that I might follow their leads. My mother mentioned that she had heard of education programs that resulted in teaching certification and a master?s degree. The idea of an advanced degree appealed to me very much (two years earlier, I had applied to, gained admission to, and declined to enter several master?s programs in the field of library science; between applying and being admitted, I had decided that the field was not inspiring enough for me). By the end of this conversation, I had decided to research and apply to graduate education programs.

I don?t wish to make too much of the seemingly cavalier nature of my decision, as if it portends the decision I?ve since reached. In truth, teaching had often crossed my mind and, while I was crafting my essay for application to CU?s program, I discovered the raw materials that would later develop into a real passion for the power of teaching. My purpose for sharing this story is simply to set the stage. Once I sent in my application, there was no doubt in my mind that this was the path I wished to follow, and I waited anxiously and eagerly for word of my acceptance.

I recently re-read that application essay and was surprised to find that my guiding educational philosophy has not changed much since then. The Master?s Plus program has helped me fine-tune my thinking about education, given me new perspectives on teaching, and initiated me into the practical and theoretical world of the professional educator. Though I might write that application essay in different words today, I probably would convey the same message about why public education is important to me. As I said in that essay, teaching is about introducing young people to their own minds.

I didn?t expect to intellectualize or emotionalize teaching as much as I now do. I expected that the Master?s Plus program would show me some specific ways to be an effective educator from a rather utilitarian perspective. From a very early point in the program, however, my professors asked me to think about essential questions that led to a highly personal, philosophical, political, and intellectual quest. Three of the most important questions, raised by Jenifer Helms, were: (1) What is teaching for? (2) Who do you want to be in the classroom? and (3) How will you provide a fundamentally just education for all of your students? I found the soul searching and thinking I was asked to do immediately compelling when I saw that the best teaching is an extension of the best aspects of the teacher?s personality, philosophy, politics, and intellect.

The overall impact of the Master?s Plus program on me as a teacher (yes, I think of myself as a teacher, in spite of my decision; more about that later) and as a person has been transformative and augmentative. Lectures, field experiences, class discussions, late-night debates with classmates, readings, conversations with students, other teachers, and administrators, faculty meetings, e-mail discussion groups, movies, journal articles, countless papers and projects have all served as rafts upon which I have floated as I have navigated the obscure waters of becoming a professional educator. As I continue to become, new experiences, readings, writings, and discussions continue to keep me afloat.

One of the most important results of the program is that I have developed a very well-defined sense of what really matters to me and what I think good teaching is. I have developed well-informed and soundly conceived notions of what teaching is for, who I want to be in the classroom, and how I will provide a fundamentally just education for all of my students. These notions are formed from clay, not hewn from marble, so new ideas and experiences constantly reshape them. Nonetheless, I would not have reached the point where I find myself today if not for the complex experience that the Master?s Plus program has been for me.

In the midst of the program, my wife?s father, Joe, became very sick. In the five years I had known him, I had grown very close to Joe. He lived by himself in a trailer in Arizona with very few friends and no family to take care of him. For the first half of my second semester in the program, my wife and I were apart while she stayed in the Arizona hospital with her father. In the second half of the semester, we had him moved to a nursing home here in Boulder and shared the duties of making his life as good as it could be.

A 57-year-old man who suddenly finds himself unable to take care of himself and unable to leave his bed in a nursing home needs a lot of care and attention if he?s going to believe that life is worth living at all. Most days that semester, my wife and I would visit him in the morning before I went to class and she went to work. Then, after class, I would drop by to see him and give him a shave (he loved a good shave, sometimes more than once a day). I would then go to work. After work, my wife and I would again go visit him in the nursing home. It was an exhausting schedule and I?m amazed we were able to sustain it as long as we did.

By midsummer, my father-in-law, an active and independent man before his sudden illness, decided that he no longer wished to continue living the way he was being forced to. He asked to stop receiving the food and fluids he?d been receiving through tubes for the past five months, and died of dehydration just ten days later.

Joe?s death at such a young age caused me to think even more deeply about how I wanted to live my own life. One of the things I had always admired about Joe was his commitment to living in accordance with his own values. I wondered how much I was managing to do that in my life. It was with this in mind that I entered student teaching.

When I chose my student teaching assignment, I was influenced by the advice of people who said, "I know you want to teach in an alternative school, but be realistic; traditional schools are where the jobs are. You should do your student teaching in a traditional setting so that you have that background." In the course of my student teaching, I realized that if this was where the jobs were, then I didn?t want them.

Not that my student teaching experience was so terrible. Simply, the experience clarified for me the kind of teacher I want to be and the kind of setting in which I might be that teacher. I had a fantastic cooperating teacher who taught me mostly by example (is there any other kind of good teaching, after all?). Under her supportive supervision, I developed my own teaching landscape that consisted of three important elements.

One of the most important aspects of my cooperating teacher?s landscape was humor. Almost anything was good for a laugh, and this quickly became her best classroom management tool. I adopted her jocose style almost immediately, and also integrated contemporary and classic music into my teaching. I used humor and music not to turn my teaching into a standup comedy routine or variety show, but to connect with my students on a human level, to help break down the barriers between teacher and students.

The school in which I student taught was approximately 35% Latino, but part of my student teaching experience was in a school-within-a-school program for students put at-risk that was 100% Latino. These students influenced my teaching greatly, and that influence carried over into my "mainstream" classes. One of the most important things these students taught me was the importance of explicit conversation about racial power politics as they relate to students? lives. In all of my student teaching, I took advantage of opportunities to discuss with students of all backgrounds how their skin colors affected their everyday experiences. The Aryan football player and the Mexican tagger were able to have honest conversations about how and why their experiences, even in the limited context of school, were different because of their backgrounds. This candid and critical approach to racial and political issues in the classroom became a second element of my teaching landscape.

The third element of my teaching landscape that developed during my student teaching was a concern for social responsibility. I had one class in particular that was incredibly mean and disrespectful toward one another. Despite the rhetoric of respect and tolerance present in the posters that littered the hallway, I felt that many of my students needed a better understanding of how their actions, words, and even thoughts impact other people in their lives. I enacted a number of lessons designed to help bring about this improved understanding.

But this is not an essay about methods. This is about the teaching landscape, my unique orientation in relation to the experience of teaching. These three elements are broad brushstrokes with which to paint the landscape, but they evoke many important details. When I look back on these three elements, I notice that they are aspects of teaching that many people would say are ancillary, unnecessary, and, perhaps, that pejorative of all pejoratives, inefficient. The school in which I student taught developed what they considered to be a very rigorous curriculum in my discipline, the language arts. Unfortunately, "rigor" in our schools (like its well-meaing cousin, "standards") is often embodied in laundry lists of tasks that students must accomplish during a given term or school year. There was no great concern for the quality of the work the students did, nor for what they learned while doing it. Students were simply expected to read a prescribed novel, write a research paper, give an oral presentation, interpret poetry, and master parts of speech. For me, these were the things that became ancillary. I believe this says a great deal about who I am as a teacher, and about what I believe teaching is for.

The three elements of my landscape upon which I focus point to one central theme: healthy, productive, mutually beneficial human relationships. One of the most unethical practices in which teachers engage (in the classical sense) is the transmission of their own values to their students. In my opinion, this is also one of the most important opportunities that teaching affords. It is my firmly held belief that we citizens of the world need to focus more of our collective energy on building and fostering human relationships of quality and sincerity, and I proudly use teaching as a bully pulpit to influence my students to agree with me, to encourage them to care about how they treat others, and about how others are treated.

But a teacher does not work in isolation, and a single teacher is not the single influence on his students? worldview. During student teaching, the importance of the school culture to the success of teachers and students became very clear to me. A single teacher can attempt to do amazing things for students in his classroom, but he cannot control the experiences his students have in other classrooms or in the hallways. If the school culture does not reinforce and affirm the same core values that the teacher attempts to instill, his efforts are merely ripples in a lake, not the waves that could be created by an entire system devoted to those values. During my short time in that school, I witnessed: (1) A teacher being asked to resign for alleged harassment of his students, (2) A relatively new teacher being publicly attacked and humiliated for straying too far from the prescribed curriculum, and (3) A principal being arrested and resigning his position under allegations of sexual misconduct with a student. These three incidents in a four-month period may serve as barometers by which to gauge the cultural climate of the school. There was a bit of spiritual illness to the place that made meaningful teaching as I define it difficult to realize.

As progressive and conservative educators alike have proven, a unified vision of desirable outcomes and futures for students is one of the most important aspects of successful educational endeavors. The impact of each individual teacher?s efforts is magnified exponentially by the reinforcement and affirmation of the values manifested by those efforts throughout the school culture. To be the kind of teacher I want to be, I first need to find a school culture that shares my vision of a desired future for my students.

But I don?t wish to place all of the responsibility on the structure of school and, thereby, shirk my own responsibilities in creating a meaningful educational experience for my students. One of the other important realizations I came to while student teaching is that, to be the kind of teacher I want to be, I need to invest my heart, soul, and mind almost exclusively in designing my students? educational experience, at least in the first few years. I honestly believe that I am capable of constructing a significant curriculum based on concern for human relationships, and that this curriculum would provide an environment in which authentic learning could occur. However, I am not prepared at this point in my life to make the commitment that this would require. I would be lying to myself, to my prospective employers, and to my students if I said I was. There are many other goals I must prioritize ahead of teaching, including building a family, establishing financial security, and pursuing other creative interests. Currently, I have the opportunity to make a lot of money in a short amount of time doing something I truly enjoy: computer programming (a profession which, currently, is enjoying a status quite opposite to that of teaching, i.e. overappreciated, overpaid, and underworked). This will facilitate my ability to pursue those three priorities in a way that teaching (at least the way I?d like to do it) could not. The sad fact is that if I chose to teach right now, knowing what I was giving up to do so, I would be inviting intense bitterness into my life, bitterness that would have no other outlet than my students, my family, and my friends. This would take me far away from being the teacher I want to be.

It may seem extreme and uncharacteristically dogmatic for me to take this "all-or-nothing" approach to becoming a teacher. I agree, but I?m really just saying, "all or nothing right now." For me, this decision is about responding thoughtfully to circumstances and living in the present with clearly defined core values. If I am able to accomplish other important goals of mine, such as those mentioned earlier, in the next few years, thanks to my fortuitous employment in the high tech world, it is quite possible that I?ll return to teaching, but I?ll be looking to be a part of major changes in the educational system.

While I firmly believe that teaching is an incredibly valuable and meaningful occupation, I still have doubts about whether my teaching landscape could be played out in a school setting. I have doubts about whether it really makes sense to lock kids up for 10 years under the pretense of giving them some sort of gift. When you force something upon someone, you are asking him to submit or resist. Why are we surprised when kids act like their education is something that is being shoved down their throats? Why are we surprised when they feel the need to oppose that shoving? Are there other contexts in which teaching and learning could happen and do happen more effectively and beneficially for all involved parties? Regardless of my profession, the Master?s Plus program has brought me to the realization that I am a teacher. I am committed to working with kids to help them become good people who lead meaningful lives. However, I have also realized that my future teaching landscape may have to be realized outside of the context of a school building.

If you observed an isolated day in my classroom, you might not pick out this particular passion of mine. You might notice that I tend to focus on music as text, method, and pedagogy. Or you might notice that I insist that my students reflect on how their actions affect others. You might notice that I enjoy engaging students in conversations about grammar and pragmatics. You might also notice that, whenever possible, I avoid telling students what to do. That I talk to students individually and as a group about things they want to talk about. That I expose a fair amount of myself personally in my interactions with students. That my students and I laugh. A lot. That I read to my students. You might not catch a lesson in which media culture is explicitly featured. You might not hear a single overtly political statement from my students or me. Nevertheless, all of these elements, those that are conspicuous and those that are conspicuously absent, originate, at least in part, in my passion for participating in the development of just plain good human beings.

It?s difficult for me to say where this all comes from. I grew up fairly sheltered in an environment that, like most in our society, valued conformity. On the larger social issues, like what it took to succeed in school, I conformed. However, I had a predilection for rebellion and eccentricity. Partly by luck and partly by design, I was exposed to materials, ideas, cultural productions, individuals, and institutions that fueled this predilection. The more I was exposed to, the more prone to nonconformity I became. Externally, the most rebellious thing I did was to dye my hair or pierce my ear, but internally, my thoughts and theories began to reproduce and diverge at a remarkable rate. Because I had gained the respect of peers, teachers, administrators, and parents by performing so well in the academic milieu, I was given a great deal of latitude in my philosophical experiments. The final experience that clinched my self-definition as intellectual and social radical was my undergraduate career at a liberal arts college in New England that was chock full of freaks, misfits, and geniuses. That experience was one of the most important in my life in helping me explore and define who I am.

It is painfully evident in any given high school classroom that most students do not have the opportunities I had to explore their own minds and their attitudes toward the world in which they live. Many students do not have the support structure, and many others have not ingratiated themselves to the powers that be in such a way as to gain their indulgence. For this reason, it is my hope that my example will at least spur some investigation of the many possibilities that exist for being a philosophical and compassionate person in the world.

My greatest challenge, the greatest impediment to fully realizing this person that I want to be in the classroom, and to enacting my passion at every moment, is an unwillingness to pour my entire heart, soul, and life energy into this practice of teaching. It seems to me that, to be the kind of teacher I want to be, I will have to invest everything I have and several things I don?t have yet in the effort. A teacher with such high aims for his students, it seems, must make many personal sacrifices. There is a barely-conscious belief in a greater good, a belief that personal sacrifice in the present will inevitably yield delayed-but-extraordinary gratification in the future, even when that is not the goal. And there is also the belief that the necessary sacrifices might include, but are not limited to: all other life passions, family, friends, mindless recreation, physical exercise, adequate nutrition, and solitude.

I admit that I am not prepared for such sacrifices. I am not prepared to be the teacher I know I can be, because I?m not quite sure yet that that is what I want to be right now. The challenge, then, is almost entirely internal. If I?m ever able or inclined to rise to my own challenge, I?m confident that I?ll be a very good teacher and that I?ll teach in a manner harmonious with my passion. I?m aware that I am perhaps setting unrealistic goals for myself, and that the unreality of these goals might be construed as a way to convince myself that the effort is futile, and thus absolve me of the responsibility and hard work of becoming a good teacher. I?m not entirely convinced that this is not exactly the game I?m playing with myself. The all-or-nothing mentality can be a very convenient way of rationalizing the choice of nothing, and I know myself well enough to know that I might very well be giving myself the easy out by caving to this challenge.

Of course, none of this means that I?m opposed to social justice, constructivism, experiential learning, the questions curriculum, standards, or, quite honestly, voodoo in the classroom. In fact, all of these progressive movements in education play an important role in rock and roll pedagogy. My pedagogy is informed by all of these schools of thought, but it is also informed by mass media, popular culture, real students, and an extremely critical eye on the traditional and alternative worlds of education. Rock and roll pedagogy synthesizes these divergent influences into a theory of knowledge, learning, and teaching that is far greater in scope than the sum of its parts.

Central to rock and roll pedagogy is, of course, rock and roll (as well as other genres of music). Music is a vital influence in most teenagers? lives and a rich source of educational material. By bringing music into the classroom, the rock and roll educator makes connections with students, allows their interests to influence the curriculum, and provides a context in which to study contemporary and historical social issues. Rock and roll pedagogy relies on the inclusion of heavy metal, alternative rock, rap, hip-hop, jazz, punk, country, bluegrass, techno, classical, experimental, electronic, folk, blues, and other music from all over the world for its success. Music shakes up the classroom, provides alternative texts, and reels students into the educational experience.

My primary concern as an educator is with my students? individual development as human beings. I want to help them clarify what is important to them in their lives, to encourage them to plan and live their lives in accordance with those values, and to provide them with the tools they need to read, interpret, and enjoy the world in which they live. This is particularly important for students who feel ill at ease, alienated, resistant, bored, frustrated, or unhappy in a traditional school environment.

The class was not ethnically or economically diverse, but there was a great deal of social diversity in the classroom. Students self-identified as members of a number of different cliques and actively antagonized rivals with insults and assaults. The few "quiet" students in the class, innocent bystanders in the melee, contributed to the problems by choosing not to attend the class. Gradually, the problems in the class led to low attendance, low grades, and low achievement on the part of the students and me. A few students came to me to complain about the way they were being treated by their classmates.

Following my cooperating teacher?s established practice, I posted updated grades each Monday. Approximately six weeks into the 12-week trimester, I posted the grades and found that the class average was a very low D. My other classes had C and B averages. Although I had placed no special emphasis on grades throughout the term, I knew that most students had learned to respond to grades as an indicator of school success. At the end of class, I handed a note card to each student and asked them to write their own explanations of the low grades. I provided no other guidance. Most of the students filled at least one side of their note cards and stayed late to finish writing their thoughts, and most quickly made the leap from the grades to the social problems in the classroom. The anonymity and private nature of this activity gave even the most reluctant or passive students a chance to express their thoughts.

Some of the responses to the quotes were not constructive at all. In fact, a few of the responses were simply continuations of the insulting, abusive traditions of the class. However, all of the responses were telling and important. For example, one of the students most responsible for raising the stakes of animosity in the classroom also happened to have one of the highest grades. His lack of understanding of how his words and actions affected his classmates was evidenced by responses like: "So what? I?m still getting an A."

Instead of seeking immediate closure to this activity (thought museums are usually "curated" and discussed as "exhibits"), I used it as a warm-up for a class meeting to discuss the root of the problems and how to solve them. Again, most of the students (even the quiet ones) were enthusiastic and eager to discuss the problems. I assumed the role of facilitator and tried to guide the discussion only to maintain focus. The only rules I insisted upon were: (1) speak in positive terms, and (2) avoid statements about specific individuals or groups. I encouraged students to discuss the problems and their causes exhaustively before they began to brainstorm solutions.

There was very little need for a facilitator in the discussion. The students stayed focused, spoke constructively, and respected one another?s opportunities to speak. I took on the role of recorder and made notes on the overhead to keep track of the discussion. A few students felt that the discussion was "going around in circles" and needed encouragement that their apparently circular talk would lead to its own conclusions. By the end of the 70-minute period, students had discussed insightfully a number of complex issues and proposed a number of solutions for which they and I would be responsible.

The following day, I began class with the customary warm-up exercise, then introduced a new, short list of class rules that had surfaced in the previous day?s discussion. The students accepted the new rules (examples: "All words and actions in this class will be without harmful intent," and "All assignments are due on the deadline without exception") and class proceeded in an eerily quiet, orderly fashion.

Of course, the day after the conflagration is always still. The proof of the effectiveness of the lesson was in the remaining weeks of the trimester. Attendance improved greatly, with many students who ditched class 80 percent of the time suddenly coming to class every day. The class average climbed steadily and reached a B+ by the end of the term (though, interestingly, the gloating A student?s grade slipped just below the mean). Participation in class activities improved immensely. Time spent on- task increased dramatically. Remarkably, students who had cultivated special hostilities toward one another actually developed working relationships.

It would be an overstatement to claim that this class transformed into a utopian educational environment. There was still plenty of impolite speech and off-task activity in the classroom to the very end. However, by encouraging students to tackle their own problems in the classroom, I was able to guide them toward an increased awareness of their own actions and of how they might improve the situation in which they found themselves.

p.1 "If we want to improve America?s schools, we will have to apply in the classroom what we know about humans as intelligent, learning, thinking creatures."

p.6 "If we expect every high school graduate to either enter college or find employment, then we expect all students to have high-order skills..."

"The rules of the culture of power are a reflection of the rules of the culture of those who have power."

"Those with power are frequently least aware of?or at least willing to acknowledge?its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence."

"...parents who don?t function with [the culture of power]...want to ensure that the school provides their children with discourse patterns, interactional styles, and spoken and written language codes that will allow them success in the larger society."

"...students ultimately find themselves held accountable for knowing a set of rules about which no one has ever directly informed them."

"The teacher cannot be the only expert in the classroom. To deny students their own expert knowledge is to disempower them."

"...the attempt by the teacher to reduce and exhibition of power by expressing herself in indirect terms may remove the very explicitness that the child needs to understand the rules of the new classroom culture."

"They must be encouraged to understand the value of the code they already possess as well as to understand the power realities in this country. Otherwise they will be unable to work to change these realities."

"...the negative effects of failure may generalize to all tasks perceived to fall into the same ability area, resulting in: (a) decreased persistence in the face of difficulties; (b) avoidance of the area if that option is available; and (c) perhaps interference with the acquisition of new material in that area."

p. 53: "Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other."

p. 55: "The solution in not to ?integrate? them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become human ?beings for themselves."

p. 58: "Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication."

p. 62: "Education as the practice of freedom?as opposed to education as the practice of domination?denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people."

p. 66: "Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects."

p. 66: "The pursuit of full humanity?cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity?"

p. 45: "...despite many statistical studies indicating an absence of test bias defined in terms of differential validity for minority versus nonminority individuals, many uses of tests may be unfair or biased against minorities in the nontechnical meaning of these terms."

p. 47: "...probably the strongest direct influence of testing on the educational opportunities of minority pupils in the United States came about through the use of test results to track students into different ability groups in both elementary and secondary schools."

p. 54: "...the practice of educational tracking tends to perpetuate and reinforce preexisting performance differences."

p. 70: "...a more important criterion for determining the utility of admissions tests and educational programs ought to be whether or not students learn and acquire skills and knowledge that are of value either to themselves or to society." (citing Astin)

p. 73: "What needs to be opposed is the use of tests that serve to justify and perpetuate social and educational disadvantages of minorities. And from a more positive perspective, what is needed is to use test results not so much to make decisions about individual students, as to examine critically how our schools are serving their interests."

p. xiii: "Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents."

p. 2: "Ultimately our aim should be to attain universal literacy at a very high level, to achieve not only greater economic prosperity but also greater social justice and more effective democracy."

p.12: "The civic importance of cultural literacy lies in the fact that true enfranchisement depends upon knowledge, knowledge upon literacy, and literacy upon cultural literacy."

p. 23: "Radicalism in politics, but conservatism in literate knowledge and spelling: to be a conservative in the means of communication is the road to effectiveness in modern life, in whatever direction one wishes to be effective."

p.51: "We are able to make our present experiences take on meaning by assimilating them to prototypes formed from our past experiences."

pp.106-7: "By accident of history, American cultural literacy has a bias toward English literate traditions...But the benefit we derive is to come to the tolerant understanding that no single national vocabulary is inherently superior or privileged above all others... The specific contents of the different national vocabularies are far less important than the fact of their being shared."

p. 145: "...breaking the cycle of illiteracy for deprived children; raising the living standard for families who have been illiterate; making our country more competitive in international markets; achieving greater social justice; enabling all citizens to participate in the political process; bringing us closer to the Ciceronian ideal of universal public discourse ?in short, achieving fundamental goals of the Founders at the birth of the republic."

p. 64: "Our responsibility as White educators is to understand the past and present dynamics of dominance in order that we might more effectively contribute to the creation of a better future for all of our students."

p. 69: "...intellectual achievement as measured from the perspective of Western institutions does not necessarily confer wisdom in the multicultural dimension."

p. 75: "As White educators, we cannot fully know or experience the struggles of our students and colleagues of color, but we can work to create an empathetic environment in which their stories and experiences can be acknowledged and shared."

p. 78: "Once we become aware of the persistent and pernicious nature of dominance, we begin to realize that each choice we make regarding educational structure, process, content, curriculum, or pedagogy has implications for equity and social justice."

p. 81: "From my perspective, the multicultural education process engages us in five key arenas of learning:

1. To know who we are racially and culturally
2. To learn about and value cultures different from our own
3. To view social reality through the lens of multiple perspectives
4. To understand the history and dynamics of dominance
5. To nurture in ourselves and our students a passion for justice and the skills for social action"

p. 112: "To teach my White students and my own children that they are "not White" is to do them a disservice. To teach them that there are different ways of being White, and that they have a choice as White people to become champions of justice and social healing, is to provide them a positive direction for growth and to grant them the dignity of their own being."

p. 16: "These were schools for youngsters who had mastered strategies of not-learning and infuriated school authorities but had done nothing wrong. The schools were created to separate, within an already racially segregated system, teachers who were failing their students from their angry victims."

p. 91: "At the heart of commitment to equity is the sentiment that what is just and what is legal do not necessarily coincide, and that struggling for justice demands resisting or changing rules if they conflict with one?s notion of justice. This implies appeal to moral rather than political or legal authority."

p. 130: "When it is impossible to remain in harmony with one?s environment without giving up deeply held moral values, creative maladjustment becomes a sane alternative to giving up altogether. Creative maladjustment consists of breaking social patterns that are morally reprehensible, taking conscious control of one?s place in the environment, and readjusting the world one lives in based on personal integrity and honesty ?that is, it consists of learning to survive with minimal moral and personal compromise in a thoroughly compromised world and of not being afraid of planned and willed conflict, if necessary. It also means searching for ways of not being alone in a society where the mythology of individualism negates integrity and leads to isolation and self-mutilation. It means small everyday acts of maladjustment as well as occasional major reconstruction, and it requires will, determination, faith that people can be wonderful, conscious planning, and an unshakable sense of humor.

Creative maladjustment is reflective. It implies adapting your own particular maladjustment to the nature of the social systems that you find repressive. It also implies learning how other people are affected by those systems, how personal discontent can be appropriately turned into moral and political action, and how to speak out about the violence that thoughtless adjustment can cause or perpetuate."

p. 140: "...the ways students behave is as much a consequence of the system in which they are required to learn as anything within themselves, their communities, and cultures."

p. 152: "What makes a child at risk? What is the hidden agenda of the people who have manufactured the ?at-risk? category? What are at-risk children at risk of doing? In plain language, at-risk children are at risk of turning the poverty and prejudice they experience against society rather than learning how to conform and take their ?proper? place. The children are maladjusting, and it their teachers? role to make that maladjustment functional and creative rather than to suppress it.

One powerful way for educators to creatively maladjust is to repudiate all categories and assume responsibility for changing their practice until it works for the children they have previously been unable to serve. Another is to advocate genuine educational choice within the public schools and to demand that teachers, parents, and other groups of educators should have the right to create small schools within the context of large public school systems, with the freedom and resources to operate effectively."

"...the ?overjustification? hypothesis suggested by self-perception theory-- the proposition that a person?s intrinsic interest in an activity may be decreased by inducing him to engage in that activity as an explicit means to some extrinsic goal."

"...a person induced to undertake an inherently desirable activity as a means to some ulterior end should cease to see the activity as an end in itself."

p. 4: "The task of creating environments where all kids can experience the power of their ideas requires unsettling not only our accepted organization of schooling and our unspoken and unacknowledged agreement about the purposes of schools. Taking this task seriously also means calling into question our definitions of intelligence and the ways in which we judge each other."

p. 7: "Schools dependent upon private clienteles ?schools that can get rid of unwanted kids or troublemaker families, exclude on the basis of this or that set of beliefs, and toss aside the ?losers??not only can avoid the democratic arts of compromise and tolerance but also implicitly foster lessons about the power of money and privilege, a lesson already only too well known by every adolescent in America."

p. 22: "...we saw collaboration and mutual respect among staff, parents, students, and the larger community as part of what we meant by calling our experiment democratic."

p. 26: "...schools can undermine family support systems, can undercut children?s faith in their parents as educators and in their community as a worthy place."

p. 41: "These five ?habits? include concern for evidence (how do you know that?), viewpoint (who said it and why?), cause and effect (what led to it, what else happened), and hypothesizing (what if, supposing that).

But most important of all is the 5^th ?habit?: who cares? Knowing and learning take on importance only when we are convinced it matters, it makes a difference."

p. 63: "If we want children to be caring and compassionate, then we must provide a place for growing up in which effective care is feasible...Caring is as much cognitive as affective. The capacity to see the world as others might is central to unsentimental compassion and at the root of both intellectual skepticism and empathy."

p. 81: "In demonizing the Right, or the Left, we avoid seeing our overlapping fears and our overlapping hopes."

p. 81: "The habits conducive to free inquiry don?t just happen with age and maturity. They take root slowly. And uncertainties, multiple viewpoints, the use of independent judgment, and pleasure in imaginative play aren?t luxuries to be grafted on to the mind-set of a mature scholar, suited only to the gifted few, or offered after school on a voluntary basis to the children of parents inclined this way. It?s my contention that these are the required habits of a sound citizenry, habits that take time and practice."

p. 140: "For the kinds of changes necessary to transform American education, the work force of teachers must do three tough things more or less at once: change how they view learning itself, develop new habits of mind to go with their new cognitive understanding, and simultaneously develop new habits of work -habits that are collegial and public in nature, not solo and private as has been the custom in teaching."

p. 152: "Too often schooling becomes a vast game in which teachers try to trick students into revealing their ignorance while students try to trick teachers into not noticing it. Getting a good grade, after all, is getting the teacher to think you know more than you do!"

"Good English is that form of speech which is appropriate to the purposes of the speaker, true to the language as it is, and comfortable to speaker and listener. It is the product of customer, neither cramped by rule nor freed from all restraint; it is never fixed, but changes with the organic life of the language."

p. 62: "...to ?educate? students. Contrary to conventional school practice, what that means is that we want to elicit from students the meanings that they have already stored up so that they may subject those meanings to a testing and verifying, reordering and reclassifying, modifying and extending process. In this process, the student is not a passive ?recipient?; he becomes an active producer of knowledge. The word ?educate? is closely related to the word ?educe.? In the oldest pedagogic sense of the term, this meant drawing out of a person something potential or latent."

p. 92: "In other words, you end up with a ?student-centered curriculum? not because it is good for ?motivation? but because you don?t, in fact, have any other choice." (referring to the highly individual nature of learning that transforms content for every student)

p. 100: "?Projection,? as the term is used by semanticists such as Korzybski and Hayakawa, means that we transfer our own feelings and evaluations to objects outside of us. For example, we say, ?John is stupid? or ?Helen is smart,? as if ?stupidity? and ?smartness? were characteristics of John and Helen. A literal translation of ?John is stupid? (that is, its most scientific meaning) might go something like this: ?When I perceive John?s behavior, I am disappointed or distressed or frustrated or disgusted. The sentence I use to express my perceptions and evaluation of these events is ?John is stupid."

When we say, ?John is stupid,? we are talking about ourselves much more than we are talking about John. And yet, this fact is not reflected at all in the statement. The I ?the involvement of the perceiver?has been removed by a grammatical peculiarity. Our grammar has forced us to ?objectify? our feelings, to project them onto something outside of our skins."

p. 148: "If we can get a large group of our students engaged in the process of asking questions about what they are doing -about their assumptions, their metaphors, their language- then we feel satisfied that we have helped them to become creative agents in any new education that might be conceived... in general, they have been freed from a dependence on arbitrary authority. They have greater respect for themselves as professionals because they are no longer mere functionaries willing to accept the palpably inefficient and irrelevant bureaucratic rituals. They are anti-entropic agents ready to question (and provide alternative answers to) the attitudes in the schools that produce institutional inertia. They are agents of self-renewal."

p. 150: "An ?open,? nonauthoritarian atmosphere can, then, be seen as conducive to learner initiative and creativity, encouraging the learning of attitudes of self-confidence, originality, self-reliance, enterprise, and independence. All of which is equivalent to learning how to learn."

p. 151: "1. Eliminate all conventional ?tests? and ?testing.?

3. Eliminate all ?requirements.?

4. Eliminate all full-time administrators and administrations.

5. Eliminate all restrictions that confine learners to sitting still in boxes inside of boxes."

p. 152: "[Any course is] a kind of rigged quiz show. And it seems to work only if the participants value the ?prize.? The ?prize,? of course, is a ?grade.?"

p. 153: "The ?requirements,? indeed, force the teacher ?and adminstrator? into the role of an authoritarian functionary whose primary task becomes that of enforcing the requirements rather than helping the learner to learn."

p. 153: "If schools functioned according to the democratic ideals they pay verbal allegiance to, the students would long since have played a major role in developing policies and procedures guiding its operation."

p. 157: "One of the functions of this kind of schooling is to open an avenue of constructive, responsible participation in community affairs to adolescents and young adults who are now usually denied such opportunity, and who, partly as a consequence, turn to anticommunity activities as an alternative."

p. 166: "The way to be liberated from the constraining effects of any medium is to develop a perspective on it ?how it works and what it does. Being illiterate in the processes of any medium (language) leaves on at the mercy of those who control it."

p. 179-180: "If more and more students become less and less interested in what we have to offer them, we will, I believe, begin to discover by default what our profession is all about, and what it should have been from the beginning: the study of how students learn by asking and being asked relevant questions. The student must be central in any curriculum development. Not central to the limit that we bear him in mind as we construct our intellectual houses, but central in that our curricula begin with what he feels, cares about, fears, and yearns for."

p. 201: "...you will have great difficulty in imagining that your students are smart if you hold on to the belief that the stuff you know about, or would like to know about, constitutes the only ingredients of ?smartness.? Once you abandon that idea, you may find that your students do, in fact, know a great deal of stuff..."

pp. 205-6: "Ask yourself how you came to know whatever things you feel are worth knowing. This may sound like a rather abstract inquiry, but when undertaken seriously it frequently results in startling discoveries. For example, some teachers discovered that there is almost nothing valuable they know that was told to them by someone else. Other teachers have discovered that their most valuable knowledge was not learned in a recognizable sequence. Still others begin to question the meaning of the phrase ?valuable knowledge? and wonder if anything they learned in school was ?valuable.?

p. 207: "The basic function of all education, even in the most traditional sense, is to increase the survival prospects of the group."

p. 218: "The new education has as its purpose the development of a new kind of person, one who ?as a result of internalizing a different series of concepts- is an actively inquiring, flexible, creative, innovative, tolerant, liberal personality who can face uncertainty and ambiguity without disorientation, who can formulate viable new meanings to meet changes in the environment which threaten individual and mutual survival."

p. 58: "Just as the rewards in painting-by-numbers are quick but superficial, so the rewards of writing by rote give a false sense of having ?mastered? a skill that is organic. In so doing, it can kill one of the strongest impulses of the human species: the need to give shape to our experiences, thoughts, and feelings, reflecting our own emerging patterns from within, not those imposed from without."

p. 2: "If, for example, we try to organize schools and create curriculum based on an assumption of failure and decay, then we make school life a punitive experience."

p. 4: "We need a different kind of critique, one that does not minimize the inadequacies of curriculum and instruction, the rigidity of school structure or the ?savage inequalities? of funding, but that simultaneously opens discursive space for inspired teaching, for courage, for achievement against odds, for successful struggle, for the insight and connection that occur continually in public school classrooms around the country."

p. 29: "?you?re always asking yourself, ?What can they do now?? and you?re matching that against the place where you want them to end up.?" (from an interview with a teacher)

p. 413: "The first thing to say about the rooms I visited is that they created a sense of safety... physical safety... safety from insult and diminishment... safety to take risks..."

p. 414: "Intimately related to safety is respect... :fair treatment, decency, an absence of intimidation, and, beyond the realm of individual civility, a respect for the history, the language and culture of the peoples represented in the classroom."

p. 44: "...messing with people?s minds in complex and vital ways."

p. 48: "...language learning is naturalistic and constructivist, which is to say that people acquire language as they employ it to construct or create meaning for themselves."

p. 51: "Teachers would be a good deal more effective in language instruction, we believe, if they concentrated on helping students arrange for some realistic trials with words, with opportunities to respond imaginatively to experience through language, rather than pointing out errors."

p. 54: "The English language arts class, at its best, offers a particularly rich language community, a place where students can explore their ideas and experiences through language... The teacher will balance individual, even idiosyncratic needs and common interests. She will engage her students in using a common language, even as she recognizes the individuality and creativity of each person?s language. He will provide students with common experiences while allowing and encouraging them to develop and think about their individual interests and needs. A central aim for the English language arts teacher is to help students participate in the community of language to the fullest possible extent by providing situations and experiences that allow them to use language naturally and with increasing competence."

p. 60: "Some means of assessing language arts: eye contact, morning greetings, interest inventories, diaries and journals, learning logs, student writing of all kinds (expository as well as imaginative), oral discussions, small-group projects, mini-conferences, longer conferences, student self-assessment (oral or written), peer response, real audience response, parental response, public response, student portfolios, published writing (class, school, beyond), letters and notes (to teachers, to peers), reading reactions, book reports (use with caution), teacher-made tests (essay or short answer), commercial tests, authentic assessment (on-the-job), standardized tests?"

pp. 62-63: "The exploring teacher has a clear and articulate philosophy of learning and teaching, yet sees this as tentative and fights the tendency that resides in most of us to become settled into our own orthodoxy and routines."

p. 82: "Language, of course, is the most natural of interdisciplinary topics, for no iota of information, no fact or concept, no principle or law in any field is void of language."

p. 83: "...the test is not whether a work is great or representative of another community, but whether it sings to the students, makes connections with them and their lives."

p. 86: "By encouraging students to read, write, listen, speak, and create in as many media, forms, and genres as possible, English teachers, rather than limiting their teaching to one intelligence, are automatically helping students extend the range of their verbal and other intelligences."

p. 98: "The purpose of constructing a unit is to find ways students can connect to the material and to find ways to help students make sense of their world as they grow in levels of literacy."

p. 133: "What we actually deem as ?work? in our classrooms and what we choose to assess bespeaks our views on what education really is and what parts of our students? skills and experiences we choose to value."

p. 360: "Assessment should be related directly to learning activities and to the work done; it should be based on a broad range of evidence, not just a few quickly construct multiple-choice tests. In the best of all classrooms, assessment includes observations of students in action, finished work, and students? own self-assessment."

p. 361: "...activities that help us know what the student knows." (definition of assessment)

p. 372: "Performance assessment requires students to demonstrate their level of competence or knowledge by creating a product or response... Authentic assessment involves activities or projects that represent the literacy behavior of the community and workplace and reflect the actual learning and instructional activities of the classroom and out-of-school worlds... Constructed response assessment involves pencil and paper tasks which students answer in their own words using their own ideas... Selected response assessment involves paper and pencil tasks to check if the students know what the teacher knows."

p. 167: "He must plough his way on as best he can, making it absolutely clear what he is doing, where he is assuming something that he cannot prove, and what he is preparing them to do."

p. 170: "For holding a moral belief is in some respects like having a vision. It is in a sense, an imaginative vision of how things ought to be though they are not. Expressing a moral belief is thus attempting to share a vision or way of looking, and this cannot be done without in some sense attempting to get your interlocutor to see things as you do, if only for the time."

p. 16: "Instead of looking at reading as receiving the meaning in texts, reader-oriented theories regard reading as the creation, in concert with texts, of personally significant experiences and meanings."

p. 17: "Both the text and the reader play a part in the meaning-making process, and the relationship is constantly changing."

p. 33: "What constitutes a literary text is any text that provides a particular reader with a deeply engaging aesthetic experience. This depends largely upon the reader: her interests, abilities, preoccupations, experiences as they are brought to bear on the literary transaction in a particular moment of time."

p. 35: "Readers need to have books that understand them as they are and help them consider and perhaps outgrow their current points of view. Then they will have the desire to deepen and expand their experience."

p. 122: "Their reading, made visible, could be talked about, critiqued, manipulated, and revised."

pp. 151-2: "Literacy is both the willingness and the ability to evoke, conceive of, express, receive, reflect on, share, evaluate, and negotiate meanings, in the various forms that meanings may take."

 Last updated 7 April, 2000